“No,” she answered. “I ought not to have spoken so positively. It was too dark to see anything. There might have been dozens of people there whom I might never have seen. I was much too anxious and excited to keep a sharp look-out—why should I?—and there was not a gleam of moonlight till many minutes after the boat got back, and the confusion was very great all the time. Why do you talk so? Why do you ask such a question?”
She spoke with subdued excitement and insistance.
“Somebody was in that boat unknown to the crew,” he answered significantly.
“Was there?”
“Somebody steered the boat to shore. You do not share, I presume, in the popular belief of the phantom coxswain?”
Beatrice stopped short, trembling and scared.
“You think——?” but she could only get out those two words; she knew not how to frame the question.
He bent his head. “I do.”
But she put out her hand with a quick, passionate gesture, as if fighting with some hideous phantom.